Motown Philly Back Again

As part of my 2006-2007 sports adventure, I traveled to Philadelphia on Saturday for the Flyers-Islanders hockey game. Here are some notes from the trip:

* Even though I listened to CDs on most of my drive to and from Philly, I heard Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” three times on various radio stations. Can you say monster crossover hit?

* Of course, I also heard Toto’s “Hold the Line” (love isn’t always on time) twice, so maybe they are making a comeback.

* Philadelphia fans have a reputation as being some of the roughest and toughest in sports. From my sampling of one hockey game in Philadelphia, I was disappointed. There were a lot of fans dressed as empty seats. To be fair, the Flyers are terrible this year, plus it was an early game. I will give credit to the fans who booed the team with about 2 minutes remaining as the Flyers could not get the puck out of their zone.

* The song that played when Flyers came out for their warm-up: Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend.” This seems like an extremely random song. Actually, since many of the players are Canadian (like Loverboy) maybe this gets them pumped up.

* I had a cheese steak, and it was good.

* The Flyers showed a feature on the scoreboard of Simon Gagne and his Lamborghini. It seems to me that a Lamborghini would be a useless car to drive around Philadelphia. There are a lot of narrow streets and he could never go that fast driving on I-95 at 4:30pm on a Thursday evening. Does Gagne take the Lamborghini to the grocery store?

Next on the sports trip:

Tuesday: Pittsburgh Penguins vs. Washington Capitals at the Verizon/MCI/Phone Booth

Wednesday: Boston Celtics vs. Orlando Magic at the “new” Garden.

In case you were wondering, the Islanders won 4-3.